16 October 2014

We Are Uplifting Racoons

In the Uplift Universe of science fiction writer David Brin, humans deliberately upgrade the intelligence of chimpanzees and bottle nosed dolphins making them into sentient species equal in ability to humans.

In real life, humans are inadvertently placing selective pressures on urban raccoons that is creating a highly intelligence and capable subspecies of this scavenger species. They are smarter than previous generations of their kind and smarter than their rural counterparts. Alternately, their rapid adaptation could be a cultural or epigenetic adaptation.